


Power to the Particles

by wneleh



Category: Pacific Rim (2013)
Genre: Gen, Inspired by Fanfiction, Kid Fic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-10-31
Updated: 2015-10-31
Packaged: 2018-04-29 01:57:04
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,621
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5112092
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/wneleh/pseuds/wneleh
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Newton Geiszler, age three, falls in love with MIT.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Power to the Particles

**Author's Note:**

> The expanded canon of _Pacific Rim_ places Newton Geiszler at MIT for a heck of a long time, starting at a very early age. Cleanwhiteroom's [Designations Congruent With Things](http://archiveofourown.org/works/927457/chapters/1840169) has Newt fronting a nerd-rock band during his later years in Cambridge. Here, I try to tie this all together.

September, 1993  
Cambridge, MA

Newton usually didn’t like going piano-tuning with Papa, but Uncle Illia had said that today would be different, and Uncle Illia had been right.

Because today they had gone to Emeyetee, and Emeyetee was wonderful! The first wonderful thing about Emeyetee was the sailboats on the river, which went in the direction that the wind was blowing, but other directions as well, and Newton didn’t know how they did that but he was going to figure it out, later, during bath time, with the help of the box fan from the parlor. 

He’d wanted to watch and watch the sailboats, but Papa had pulled him away and said that they could come back later, with ice cream for lunch. As bribes went, this was completely acceptable, and Newton was glad that Papa was finally learning.

The second wonderful thing about Emeyetee was that there were signs everywhere! Newton had just figured out that some letters made MORE THAN ONE SOUND or even NONE AT ALL and now he could figure out just about every sign he saw. 

The third wonderful thing about Emeyetee was that it had a lot of pianos, so Papa was going to be busy for a long time, and Papa had said that Newton could go exploring as long as he didn’t go outside, and as long as he let Papa write “If found, please return to Building 4, preferably by 11 unless you want to feed him yourself,” on his forearm. Newton didn’t know what the first part meant, because if he didn’t go outside then wasn’t he always going to be inside the same building? But Papa had said that Emeyetee people would understand.

The second part of the message on his arm was a joke, probably.

And so now he was walking alone, down stairs and up stairs and through doors and past huge windows, and nobody was looking at him the way they looked at him when he walked alone in his neighborhood, or at the grocery store. Nobody was asking him where his mommy was, or if he was lost (“I don’t know” and “Probably” being the most truthful answers, but not usually worth the bother). Nope, at Emeyetee, people minded their own beeswax, and let Newton mind his.

Newton had never seen people carrying signs on sticks before, but up ahead there were a bunch of them. And they were shouting the words on the signs! And those words were “Power to the Particles!”

Now they were walking toward him, sing-shouting those words and waving the sticks with the signs. One man smiled at him and handed him a stick-sign, stick-first, so Newton followed them and waved his sign too. “Power to the Particles!” he yelled. “Power to the Particles!”

They walked a long way, down a long, long hall, and Newton decided to mix things up a little. “Power to the Particles! Power to the Particles! Power to the Particles! Rah rah rah!” he yelled, with beats on “pow” and “par,” and a short rest after the last “rah.” It was much better than the rhythm they’d been using (which was, really, none-at-all) and soon everyone was saying the words his way. Which showed their intelligence, Newton thought.

After a little while, they reached some doors and headed through them and Newton almost followed them but a woman with long black hair who didn’t have a sign caught him by the back of his shirt. “Slow up,” she said. “Who are you with?”

Newton knew the questions that were coming, so he put the sign down and rolled up his sleeve, showing the woman the note his father had written. 

“I’ll walk you to building 4,” said the woman. “What’s your mommy doing there?”

“Daddy,” he corrected. “Tuning pianos.”

“Second floor then,” said the woman.

They walked past a picture of a boy wearing a robe. “Who’s that?” he asked.

“A prodigy,” said the woman. “That means he was very smart when he was a little boy.”

“Why is his picture on the wall?”

“Everyone at this school wants to have been a prodigy,” said the woman. “Some even were.”

This made Newton laugh. “This isn’t a SCHOOL!” he said. He knew all about schools because he had just started co-op preschool. “There aren’t any guinea pigs!”

“We have guinea pigs, we just keep them hidden,” said the woman.

“No easels!”

“Hidden.”

“Story rug?”

“Hidden,” said the woman, as they started to walk again. “If you go to school here some day, they’ll show you where everything is.”

“I want to play with the guinea pigs NOW,” said Newton.

“To do that, you have to major in biology,” said the woman, “And biology is hard if you don’t have a good memory, and it’s full of gross, icky stuff.”

Newton had a good memory, he was pretty sure. And he liked gross, icky stuff. He liked it a lot.

“Can I go to school here now?”

“Doubtful,” said the woman. “And you really don’t want to. It’s pretty miserable.”

Newton didn’t believe that for a minute. “Power to the particle!” he shouted. 

The woman laughed. “That was a pretty neat protest, wasn’t it? Do you know what it was about?”

Newton was surprised, and a little ashamed, to realize he didn’t; he just thought it was something that happened at Emeyetee. 

“Do you know anything about high-energy physics?”

“No,” Newton said, feeling even more ashamed.

“Hey, that’s okay! I forget what kids know! All of my friends are college students!” said the woman. 

The hall was pretty wide here, with benches, and the woman led him to one. “Everything you see – you, me, this bench, even the air - is made up of really really REALLY little bits,” she said. 

“Atoms!” He did know SOMETHING.

“Exactly! But Atoms are also made of stuff.”

“Quarks!” He remembered about them because they had funny names.

“Yes! Maybe you’ll go here after all,” said the woman. “Anyway, the best way to learn about stuff is to break it, right?”

“Right!”

“And this includes particles! So there’s this machine that people are trying to build to break particles. It’s called the Superconducting Super Collider. And it is huge! Miles and miles long, in a big circle! Do you know why it has to be so huge?”

Newton shook his head.

“So that the particles can speed up super-fast!”

That made sense.

“And they need power to do this. Power to the particles!”

“Power to the particles!” Newton repeated, “Power to the particles!”

The woman dropped her voice, so Newton had to stop talking to hear. “But…. There’s a problem.”

Newton held his breath…

“It’s very, very expensive to build. So many miles! And there’s only billions of dollars for science, not billions and billions. Should a lot of it go to build a machine for breaking up particles?”

Newton had no idea.

“I don’t know the answer,” said the woman. “My physics friends say yes. I don’t really care about the money because I do math and math is cheap, but a lot of science isn’t. Like, do you want to go to Mars?”

Newton nodded vigorously. He really wanted to go to Mars and fight Martians with laser guns. He wanted this more than anything in the world.

“Well, we can’t go to Mars if we give power to the particles.” She sighed. “But we probably won’t go to Mars anyway.”

Newton frowned, but, realizing he didn’t actually own a laser gun, he decided that not going to Mars was okay. Maybe he would get a laser gun for his 4th birthday and then he could go.

“Anyway, congress is about to kill the whole project, and that has a subset of the physics community in a huge funk.”

The black-haired woman led him through a door to a staircase; it looked like a staircase he’d gone down earlier, so he figured they must be getting close to Papa. “Can you count the stairs?” the woman asked.

“In English and German and Spanish and Japanese,” Newton said. 

“How about two at a time?” She stepped on the first step. “Two,” she said. Then the next step. “Four.”

“I can count by SEVENS,” said Newton sid. He stepped on the first step. “Seven,” he said. Then the next step. “Fourteen,” he said. Then he stopped, because he realized he’d been too ambitious.

The woman jumped onto the next step for him, though, and said, “Twenty-one!” Newton counted quietly in his head, then said, “You’re right!”

“That’s three sevens in twenty-one,” said the woman. “Now figure out how many threes twenty-one holds.”

This was going to take some work. Newton stepped up a step. “Three,” he said, then, at the next step, “six,” then “nine,” then “twelve,” then “fifteen,” then “eighteen,” then, at the top of the staircase, “TWENTY-ONE!”

There were seven threes in twenty-one. There were three sevens in twenty-one. Was that really true? Did that always work? Were there five threes and three fives in the same number? Five-ten-fifteen, three-six-nine-twelve-fifteen…

Newton started running, hit a wall, bounced off it, hit the wall on the other side of the hallway, bounced back, turned and spun and…

And Papa was there, catching him. “What’s gotten into you, Newtie?”

“I think he’s being a particle accelerator,” said the black-haired woman, “or a particle therein. Have a good day!”

The numbers inside Newton’s head stopped shouting so loudly, and he turned and hugged Papa tightly. “I don’t want to go to co-op preschool,” he said, “I want to go to Emeyetee!”

Papa hugged him back. “Slow down, Newtie, there is a time for everything, wait a few years at least,” he said.

THE END

**Author's Note:**

> In the summer or fall of 1993, either I, or a friend with whom I discussed such things who was a grad student at another university, encountered "Power to the Particles" as a rallying cry among those trying to save the Superconducting Super Collider. That this was almost exactly opposite in meaning and effect to "Power to the People" says just about everything that needs to be said about why the American People didn't rise up and demand more physics.


End file.
